Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford Duel With Tears and Fury

Video

Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to address Dr. Blasey’s sexual assault allegation against the Supreme Court nominee.CreditCreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and his accuser faced off Thursday in an extraordinary, emotional day of testimony that ricocheted from a woman’s tremulous account of sexual assault to a man’s angry, outraged denial, all of which played out for hours before a riveted nation and a riven Senate.

The two very different versions of the truth, unfolding in the heated atmosphere of gender divides, #MeToo and the Trump presidency, could not be reconciled. The testimony skittered from cringe-worthy sexual details to accusations and denials of drunken debauchery to one juvenile exchange over flatulence.

Washington has not seen anything like it in a generation. For people not used to watching government in action, it was a spectacle of tantrums, tears, preening and political ambition — what Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, called, “Sadly one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the United States Senate.”

Senators must ultimately take sides, and their decisions in the coming days will determine not only the fate of Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court, but also the ideological balance of the court for decades. In the end, the judge’s future most likely rests with a handful of undecided Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Jeff Flake of Arizona — and one Democrat, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.

At least Mr. Flake, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, will have to render a decision in short order: Republican senators emerged Thursday evening from a closed-door meeting, pledging to push ahead with a committee vote scheduled for Friday morning, which would advance the nomination to the full Senate. Alone among the Republicans, the Arizona senator seemed to be wrestling with how to reconcile the competing accounts.

“There is doubt,” he said. “We’ll never move beyond that.”

Mr. Trump watched the testimony of Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, on Air Force One as he flew back from New York, where he had been attending the United Nations General Assembly. Immediately after the hearing adjourned, he praised Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony on Twitter, saying that the judge had “showed America exactly why I nominated him.”

“His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting,” the president tweeted. “Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist. The Senate must vote!”

On Thursday morning, with her voice cracking but her composure intact, Dr. Blasey told a rapt Senate panel about the terror she felt on a summer day more than 30 years ago, when, she said, a drunken young Mr. Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, tried to rip off her clothes and clapped his hand over her mouth to muffle her cries for help.

Video

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and vehemently denied the sexual assault accusation made by Christine Blasey Ford.CreditCreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

“I believed he was going to rape me,” she said, adding, “It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was going to accidentally kill me.”

A few hours later, Judge Kavanaugh delivered a blistering, scorched-earth defense. Speaking through tears at points, he denied that he assaulted Dr. Blasey — “I am innocent of this charge!” — and denounced a partisan “frenzy” bent on destroying his nomination, his family and his good name.

“This confirmation process has become a national disgrace,” he said in opening remarks written only 24 hours before. “The Constitution gives the Senate an important role in the confirmation process, but you have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.’”

Republicans rallied to his defense, and at times all decorum was tossed aside. A furious Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, practically jumped out of his seat as he denounced the proceedings as “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.”

For Judge Kavanaugh, and the nation, the stakes could not be higher: If confirmed, the judge would replace the court’s swing vote — the retired Justice Anthony M. Kennedy — with a reliable conservative, shaping American jurisprudence and pushing it toward the right for decades to come. Judge Kavanaugh had vigorously denied Dr. Blasey’s accusations before the hearing, but he wasted little time in going on the offensive.

Even before excruciating questioning about his drinking, sexual activity and personal behavior began, it was clear that Judge Kavanaugh had little interest in hiding his anger, and he sparred frequently with Democratic senators, whom he openly accused of an underhanded, last-minute attack.

His combative performance dispensed with the high-minded judicial persona he adopted during his initial confirmation hearings and embraced the partisanship Democrats have accused him of. He repeatedly rebuffed Democrats’ demands for him to request an F.B.I. investigation of the assault allegations against him.

His open attacks on Democrats — at one point, he turned a question around on Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, asking if she had a drinking problem — led members of that party to question his temperament and impartiality as a justice. But he may well have won over the 50 Republicans he needs for his confirmation.

Image

Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, surrounded by the press and supporters as the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Dr. Blasey.CreditT.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

It was a striking display by a nominee to the Supreme Court, and it stood in stark contrast to Dr. Blasey, who delivered cautious testimony laced with a scientific description of how neurotransmitters code “memories into the hippocampus” to lock trauma-related experiences in the brain.

The hearing riveted the nation. Televisions across the United States — including on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and at the Pentagon offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — were tuned in. Women were calling C-Span to share their own experiences of sexual assault.

As Dr. Blasey testified, Republican senators sat in mute witness, forgoing questioning and giving over their time to an outside lawyer, Rachel Mitchell, a sex crimes prosecutor whose clipped questioning gave the hearing a prosecutorial tone. Ms. Mitchell, who later told Republicans privately that she did not believe there was enough evidence to prosecute or even obtain a search warrant, seemed to have little success rattling Dr. Blasey or undermining her story.

But the alternative scenario — Republican male senators handling the questions — may have been worse. During a break in the hearing, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, told reporters: “I don’t think she’s uncredible. I think she’s an attractive, good witness.” Asked for clarity, he said, “In other words, she’s pleasing.”

Democrats applauded Dr. Blasey’s courage and questioned her gently; when one asked about her strongest memory of the assault, Dr. Blasey said it was of Judge Kavanaugh and his friend laughing as they piled on top of her. “The uproarious laughter between the two and having fun at my expense,” she said.

It was a stunning public appearance by a woman who never intended to become a public figure. Dr. Blasey, a research psychologist at Palo Alto University in Northern California, also swatted away any notion that she was mistaking someone else for the young Mr. Kavanaugh. She was asked by at least three Democratic senators if she was certain Judge Kavanaugh had assaulted her; three times she said yes.

“I am asking you to address this new defense of mistaken identity directly,” one of those Democrats, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said to her as she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Dr. Ford, with what degree of certainty do you believe Judge Kavanaugh assaulted you?”

Supporters of Mr. Kavanaugh rallied near the Dirksen Senate Office Building before the hearing.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

Playing out against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, only weeks before midterm elections that have already energized female voters and Democrats, the testimony occurred at the combustible intersection of politics and women’s rights. It evoked strong memories of one of Washington’s most memorable judicial confirmations: the 1991 hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment by the law professor Anita F. Hill.

“My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed by vicious and false additional allegations,” Judge Kavanaugh told the committee on Thursday. But he vowed never to withdraw.

“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” he said. “Never.”

Judge Kavanaugh condemned Democrats who he said had searched for reasons to sink him weeks before, only to turn to dark accusations. He pointed back at deep-seated liberal grudges, going back to the presidency of Bill Clinton and the victory of Mr. Trump as evidence of the animus. And he warned of dire consequences for the federal judiciary in decades ahead if nominees face a path like his.

He also directly addressed the portrait painted by Dr. Blasey of a drunken young man who tried to rape her and muffle her screams as she pleaded for help.

“I liked beer. I still like beer,” he said. “But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out, and I never sexually assaulted anyone.”

And behaving like the lawyer he is, Judge Kavanaugh cited evidence — the testimony of other witnesses who said they have no memory of the assault, and his own “very precise” calendars from the summer of 1982 — in an effort to prove that he was never at a party with Dr. Blasey, and that the assault never happened.

He also bluntly dismissed accusations raised by two other women, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, who said that they either experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct by a drunken young Mr. Kavanaugh in high school or college.

Image

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Judiciary Committee chairman, left, and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking member, talked to aides.CreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

“The Swetnick thing is a joke,” Judge Kavanaugh said under questioning. “That is a farce.”

The facts of Dr. Blasey’s story are already well known, but hearing her detail them with clarity, and sometimes confessing that she did not remember specifics, was compelling. Her main challenge was to prove that she is credible, and she appeared to have little trouble doing so.

“I know that we’ve got to take what she says very seriously,” the committee chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said during a break in the hearing.

Dr. Blasey told senators that the experience “dramatically altered my life for a long time,” and during her college years, she struggled academically because of it. And it has affected her in sometimes unusual ways, she said. When she and her husband were remodeling their home, she told senators, she insisted on having a second front door — an obvious reference to how she escaped the home where she said the assault occurred by running down the stairs and out the front door.

The young Mr. Kavanaugh described by Dr. Blasey and Democrats is a far cry from the image that the judge projected at his previous confirmation hearings, where he portrayed himself as a churchgoing father of two daughters and a beloved basketball coach for their teams.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, noted that Judge Kavanaugh has previously made statements that he never “drank so much he couldn’t remember what happened.” That statement, the senator said, is at odds with one given by Judge Kavanaugh’s freshman roommate at Yale, who has said that the young Mr. Kavanaugh was “frequently, incoherently drunk,” and that when he was, he became “aggressive and belligerent.”

Speaking calmly, Dr. Blasey used her opening statement to recount how she met Judge Kavanaugh when their social circles at their elite private schools intersected during her freshman or sophomore year, when she was 14 or 15. She said she had been friendly with a classmate of Judge Kavanaugh’s, who introduced them. “This is how I met Brett Kavanaugh, the boy who sexually assaulted me,” she said.

One evening in the summer of 1982, after a day of diving at the Columbia Country Club in suburban Washington, she attended what she said was “almost surely a spur of the moment” gathering at a nearby home, Dr. Blasey told senators. She said it was clear that Mr. Kavanaugh and one of his friends, Mark Judge, had been drinking, and that she had only had one beer. When she went up the narrow staircase to use the restroom, she said, she was pushed from behind into a bedroom.

She described how “Brett and Mark” entered the bedroom, locked the door and turned up the music. “I was pushed on the bed, and Brett got on top of me and he began running his hands over my body and grinding into me,” she said. “I yelled, hoping that someone downstairs might hear me, and I tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy.”

She said Judge Kavanaugh had a hard time removing her clothes because she was wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath. Eventually, after Mr. Judge jumped on top of them and they tumbled off the bed, she was able to escape, she said.

“I remember being on the street,” she said, “and feeling this enormous sense of relief that I escaped that house and that Brett and Mark were not coming outside after me.”

Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: High-Stakes Duel of Tears and Fury Unfold In Senate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe